Customer Service Officer

Location - Remote Working and 2 days in the Office at Bognor Regis 

Hourly Rate - £12.17

Full Time - Interim Position

Reference - 7860956

Background

The Community Hub has been designed to provide a function that helps to keep residents safe during the COVID19 crisis by meeting their urgent and ongoing need. The Community Hub front door is delivered by the Customer Experience Service where we help customers understand the support that is available to them, helping them to remain self-sufficient, but recognising ‘need’. The Community Hub manages inbound calls from residents and makes outbound calls supporting Central Government.

The role is responsible for providing a transactional front-line service direct to customers, providing solutions to queries and issues raised, for example, answering customer enquires through phone, email, letter, and social media and making outbound calls. The focus of this role is to deliver a truly customer focused service which delivers ‘Customer Excellence’ standards consistently and supports the residents of West Sussex.

Key Responsibilities

• Be proactive in providing key information to the wider service so action can be taken to proactively inform the customer and contact centre to reduce the volume of inbound calls.
• This role will work to customer focused processes and policy that supports the Customer Strategy.
• Resolve a range of customer enquiries via telephone, letter, email and social media and for example Freedom of Information request. This will involve liaison with a range of people, in order to ensure that customer issues are dealt with promptly; taking ownership of all enquiries and ensuring that the customer is kept up to date, reducing the volume of ‘avoidable contact’ services receive.
• Use initiative and judgement to decide how best to respond to a query, including asking colleagues to draft responses, referring customers to other organisations/colleagues, sending interim letters, etc. This may include using knowledge of the wider organisation, for example, knowing which department to contact to develop a response and interpreting highly technical information and convey it to the customer in a way which is meaningful and helpful.
• Provide service continuity and ensure service levels are maintained, including responding to variations in service demand.
• Receive and process customer enquires within core systems, respond if appropriate, liaise with technical staff and allocate customer enquiries to the appropriate person or team.
• On a regular basis, authorise straight forward emergency support requests direct to the Food Distributors or Community Hub Response Team, therefore, accounting for expenditures of up to £1,300 as part of the emergency response procedure – for example, arranging for delivery of food, medication or other urgent supplies. This could also involve arranging the Community Response Team to visit the Customer at their home, raising the request, and entering the cost and payment information onto the database.
• Use of a range of software tools, including all the Microsoft packages, to log calls and letters, write responses to customers, send and receive emails. Use of specialist equipment, such as, social media and the council's websites in order to resolve queries.
• Carry out efficiently a range of other administrative tasks, such as opening post, letter writing, filing and carrying out other support duties, including technical support. Taking effective care of records and documents for future reference.
• To remain up to date and compliant with all relevant organisational procedures, policies and professional codes of conduct in order to uphold standards of best practice.
• Support equality and diversity and respects customers, clients and other members of staff regardless of gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion or ethnic origin.

Key Skills

• Excellent oral and written communication skills, to be able to articulate to customers often technical information in a way which is meaningful.
• Influencing skills to be able to persuade colleagues to draft responses to letters and provide information on progress.
• Able to prioritise between competing demands and remain calm when dealing with irate or unhappy customers.
• Proficient IT skills in several specialist systems, plus the full range of  Microsoft Office.

Qualifications and Experience

• Educated to GCSE standard or equivalent qualifications or comparable experience.
• Experience of working in a customer service role, providing information, resolving queries and prioritising calls.
• Experience of use of relevant software, including social media and systems, to support service delivery.
• Knowledge of the processes involved in the work of prevention and COVID19, to be able to explain to customers what stage a piece of work is at, how it will progress, etc.

If you are interested in this role, please call 020 3641 9193 for further details or email your CV to apply@instajobsuk.com